Glory be!

This week we are celebrating the fiftieth playing of the Women’s British Open and the world’s best have gathered at glorious Royal Lytham & St Annes to battle it out for the final major title of the year.  I know there are some special celebrations planned and Jenny Lucas, formerly Lee Smith, the inaugural winner of the championship, will be in attendance.  She won as an amateur at Fulford back in 1976, in sun-baked, fast-running conditions which were a sore trial to most of us on those tree-lined fairways.

Yes indeed – I was there.  Actually, my memory is pretty good about golf dates and so on, but until I looked up the records on the aigwomensopen website I didn’t recall that I’d played in this inaugural championship.  I had remembered the tournament as being the British Amateur Strokeplay championship, which, alas, is now defunct.

Looking back it is understandable that my brains were a little scrambled as to the exact tournament I was teeing it up in.  It was a life-changing week for me as Canadian player, Pam Johns, recruited both me and my Welsh pal Lisa Isherwood for Lamar University in Texas.   The upshot was that in January 1977 we became the first women from GB&I (in fact, from Europe, I think) to sally forth to America on a golf scholarship.  It subsequently opened the floodgates across the Atlantic and I must admit to feeling a wee bit of pride in being the first to take those big steps.

I don’t, however, have a great deal of pride in recalling any of my performances in the Women’s Open.  I’m not sure that I made many weekends in the fifteen or so times I teed it up but boy, did we have fun.  There was that long stretch of years – seven in a row I believe – when we were hosted by Woburn and there were such enormous crowds streaming in to the venue that the traffic jams reached all the way back to the M1.  Heady stuff indeed.

Each year the pro-am dinner was held in the sumptuous surroundings of the Long Room at Woburn Abbey and we were all dressed to the nines.  There was one unforgettable moment when a visiting American pro didn’t want to sit with her pro-am team at the dinner and the tournament controller felt it necessary to step in.

When she was asked why she was averse to sitting with them, she declared in a voice that rang out down the room,  “I’ve spent more than five f…..g hours with them on the golf course and that’s more than enough for anyone!”

I looked across at her team of amateurs, at least two of whom were golf journos and who were sitting at my table.  They looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said to the rest of us.  “Well, she has a point!”  They then poured another glass of wine each and proceeded to have a great evening with not a bit of offense taken.  It was hilarious because she voiced exactly what so many of us felt on occasions.

I was there when Laura Davies, Ali Nicholas, Corinne Dibnah, Karrie Webb, Helen Alfredsson and Lotta Neumann all won.  Aside from the two Aussies, Webb and Dibnah, the others went on to become stalwarts of many, many European Solheim Cup teams.  One victory I’d love to have witnessed in person was that of another Aussie, Karen Lunn, who had a runaway victory in 1993.  She was supreme.  I watched that one on telly having had had back surgery a few weeks earlier.

I’ll be watching this one on telly too – the old back is misbehaving yet again which makes the travel a tad tricky.  There is so much that is different about the championship now yet somehow there is so much the same.  The prize money is huge, of course, compared to our day and the players are serious athletes whereas we were just beginning to embrace the gym, thanks mostly to the arrival of one Mr Woods.  There are more international players in the field now and the players have their own support teams of physios, mental skills and performance coaches as well as putting, short game and long game coaches.  It’s quite a caravan.

When it comes down to it, however, it’s all still about getting the ball in the hole in the fewest number of shots.  There are more players capable of winning now – the strength in depth is unreal, but I’d back any of the winners I’ve mentioned from my time to more than hold their own – and I haven’t even mentioned Annika Sorenstam, perhaps the greatest of them all.  These players had more shots, were multi-dimensional in their creativity and were able to adapt their strategies to changing conditions.  Those were the questions asked of us in the course set-ups we faced.

Nowadays, the questions asked of the players have determined how they’ve evolved.  Power, strength and the ability to hit the ball a long way are hugely rewarded and often it’s better to be miles down and in the rough rather than further back and on the fairway.  Wedges with 60 degrees of loft or more are common so the equipment is more helpful in manufacturing and finessing shots.  We used to do that with 52 degrees of loft.

It’ll be interesting to see how Lytham is set up.  What is this week’s examination paper going to demand of the contestants?  We’ve had a similar sizzler of a summer to 1976 and that first championship but there’ll be no trees to trouble the players.  (Dad would be delighted – he was brought up in the west of Ireland at Rosses Point and felt there was no place for trees on any golf course!)  The key will surely be the bunkers and the avoidance thereof, so strategy is going to play a huge part, potentially nullifying the bomb and gouge game.

It’ll be fascinating, it’ll be exciting and it’ll be life-changing for someone.  The last two Opens at Lytham have resulted in home winners in Catriona Matthew and Georgia Hall – a hat trick would be nice.

Play away please.

The other day, playing a few holes with a friend, I gave them ten questions to guess who presented the trophy at the Senior Open at Gleneagles last Sunday.*  It was a bit mean I admit but I didn’t want them working their way to the right answer, unlikely though that was and I thought the traditional Twenty Q too generous.

Today, I’d be tempted to give you all a lot more goes at guessing  the opening topic of this week’s blog.  Admittedly, there’s a substantial visual clue at the top of the piece (providing there’ve been no technical glitches) but tortoises are not really an area of  interest in these parts, let alone an area of expertise.  The expertise is still lacking but thanks to a visit by Ducky (pictured), there’s a lot more interest.

She’s an Eastern Hermann’s tortoise, about four years old, “a medium-sized herbivorous reptile native to the Balkans and southeastern Europe” according to Google’s AI overview.  It also revealed that they can be great pets because “they stay small, have a gentle personality and eat a simple plant-based diet”.  Leafy greens are the food of choice – they’re good for us humans as well – so nothing too exotic is needed on that front.  However, they need fresh food and water daily, heat lamps and sundry other accoutrements and can’t just be left to their own devices.  They’re not an easy pet option.

I read somewhere that they were slow moving but Ducky showed quite a turn of foot (claw?) when given a roam in the garden; a moment of inattention and she would have been in the bushes.  Inquisitive outings and accidents permitting, she’ll outlive her owners, so a tortoise really is for life – and beyond.

This week, at Royal Lytham and St Annes, one of the world’s great golf courses, a couple of golfing anniversaries are being celebrated at the AIG Women’s Open.  It’s the 50th anniversary of the championship, which was won by Jennie Lee Smith, now Lucas, at Fulford in 1976.  She was also a member of the Curtis Cup team that played at Lytham that year.  The Americans, who included future legends Beth Daniel and Nancy Lopez, won, as they usually did but ten years later it was a different, unexpected story, the stuff of legend.

At Prairie Dunes, in the blistering heat of Kansas (100 degrees F in old money, almost too hot even for tortoises), Diane Bailey (née Frearson, then Robb) led her team to a comprehensive victory (13-5) that beggared belief.  At Muirfield, two years earlier, under Bailey, GB and I had come agonisingly close, losing by a single point – 9 1/2 – 8 1/2 and the captain, having proved that the mighty Americans were beatable, made it her mission to do the impossible:  win on US soil.

It was something that no visiting team had done – there’d been a draw at Brae Burn in 1958 (following home wins in 1952 and 1956) – and the Curtis Cuppers weren’t expected to break a run of THIRTEEN consecutive defeats.  “We always win this thing, don’t we?” one of the Americans, Danielle Ammaccapane, said to her captain, the incomparable Judy Bell, a future president of the USGA (the first woman pres), and who could blame her?  They always did win the thing.

Amazingly, I was there, along with Dai, Michael Williams of the Daily Telegraph, Elaine Scott from Golf World (later of the LPGA) and photographer Keith Hailey.  We’d travelled more in hope than expectation and Prairie Dunes, a wonderful golf course in the middle of nowhere, was a big draw.  Anyway, I seem to remember that Dottie Pepper (who’d just become Mrs Mochrie and had been on honeymoon) duffed her opening drive…Blimey…Americans never did that, did they?  (I believe, a few years previously, one American, overcome with nerves on the 1st tee, had to hiss at her foursomes partner:  “Get up here; I can’t do this….” but I digress, as usual.)

It went from bad to worse for the home side:  Ammaccapane was penalised for building a stance in a bunker under the eyes of the USGA’s P.J. Boatrwright,  a formidable figure and undoubtedly the world’s chief rules guru and it wasn’t until the second day that the USA managed to win the first hole.  By then it was too late and I think GB and I only needed half a point from the six singles to win.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it, bloody amazing and paved the way for the Ryder Cup team to win at Muirfield Village the following year and the Walker Cup team to win at Peachtree in 1989.  They really were trailblazers.

All hail to Lillian Behan, Karen Davies, Claire Hourihane, Trish Johnson, Mary McKenna, Belle Robertson, Vicki Thomas and Jill Thornhill.  And, of course, Diane Bailey and her strong right arm and support Elsie Brown.

Two years later, at Royal St George’s, I suggested in my preview for The Times that it might have been the most outrageous fluke and, apparently, Jill Thornhill, incandescent, threw the paper to the floor, leapt out of bed and set off to prove me wrong.

Now, I used to think that that was probably my best, most effective intro in that it certainly caught the attention of the reader but, on reflection, it was a bit pants because that reader never read any further!  She completely missed the bit at the end where I suggested that it wasn’t a fluke and GB and I could win again.

And they did.

 

* The answer:  David, now Lord Cameron, the plonker I hold mainly responsible for the Brexit debacle.  The reason:  he’s an ambassador for ISPS HANDA, the sponsors of  the championship and staunch supporters of all things golf.